It’s time to talk about Irish unification as reconciliation

When the vice-president of Sinn Féin, Michelle O'Neill, told her party's annual Easter commemoration in west Belfast that there should be a referendum on a "united Ireland" within five years, she hardly recognised the full significance of the anniversary she was conjuring up.

Five decades before 2023, on March 8th, 1973, there was just such a Border poll in the north. Indeed, the Conservative government in London intended that it be repeated every 10 years. But the referendum was overwhelmingly boycotted by Catholics, and a meaningless majority of more than 500,000 backed the status quo.

British archives reveal that in February 1972, as the inevitability of direct rule loomed in the wake of Bloody Sunday, the cabinet’s ministerial committee on Northern Ireland, with the prime minister, Edward Heath, in the chair, had decided that the prorogation of Stormont – which is to say the discontinuation without dissolution – should be accompanied by a Border vote, to assuage “majority” reaction.

Edward Heath, the British prime minister, suggested that conditions in Northern Ireland 'were not always susceptible to logical argument'

Records in Dublin indicate that the taoiseach, Jack Lynch, warned Heath of the consequences, arguing that the “advent of the plebiscitary period would, on each occasion, lead to renewed polarisation of the communities”. And in July that year the new Northern Ireland secretary, William Whitelaw, advised colleagues that the effect indeed “might be to exacerbate the polarisation of politics still further”.

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But in the wake of the revelation of his secret talks with the IRA leadership, including Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, in London a fortnight earlier, Whitelaw said that “pressure from the Protestant side for an immediate commitment to a plebiscite had become intolerable”. In its absence “extreme Protestant feeling might go to the point of armed insurrection”.

It was argued in committee that the proposal was “untimely, contentious, and irrelevant”. Yet Heath, summing up, suggested that conditions in Northern Ireland “were not always susceptible to logical argument”.

In 1983, as Northern Ireland secretary, the more liberal James Prior foresaw the polarising impact of a rerun of the poll and quietly dropped it. In 1993, under Peter Brooke, it seems to have been institutionally forgotten – before re-emerging, despite its contradictions, in the Belfast Agreement.

O’Neill’s embrace of the idea thus falls, ironically, into a long tradition of militant republicanism copying the assertions of paramilitary Protestantism, from the formation of the Irish Volunteers as a mirror image of the Ulster Volunteer Force to the mural-painting, parading and flag-flying of the contemporary northern rump of “republicanism”.

Yet today a cosmopolitan vista of unification, as reconciliation among diverse individuals on the island, heaves into view, as the current Tory government disappears down the Brexit rabbit hole.

The importance of the European framework – the European Union and the Council of Europe – to the “normalisation” of Northern Ireland cannot be overestimated. With Eta, the Basque separatist organisation, about to announce its disbandment, the end is coming to the way four small peripheral regions in western Europe – the Basque Country, Cyprus, Northern Ireland and Corsica – defied the postwar suffusion of the norms of democracy, human rights and the rule of law through which the continent said never again to Nazism. Brexit represents a far-right substitution of that European peace project by a nationalist revision, in which “Britain stood alone” against Germany.

Jacques Delors visited Northern Ireland as socialist president of the European Commission in November 1992. When I interviewed him with his cabinet for this paper, he afterwards confided his support for a rapprochement between the two parts of the island. One interesting symbol of that has been the surge in northerners acquiring Irish passports since the 2016 referendum.

Redefined co-operation would be experienced, over time, simply as the organic fading of the British link as north-south integration proceeded in the European frame

Amid fears of a renewed, Brexit-induced hard Border, a plebiscite would be a blunt-instrument (and one-sided) response – less discussion, more sectarian headcount. A more sophisticated approach, less likely to lead to highly unwelcome consequences, would be to redefine the process of north-south co-operation recognised by the Belfast Agreement in two ways.

The first would be to remove the limits on that co-operation, in terms of designated implementation bodies and areas of co-operation. The second would be to render its extent a matter for evolving decision-making between restored democratic institutions in the North – if and when they can be reinstated – and those in the Republic.

Instead, in other words, of a German-style, once-and-for-all takeover of a region by a state – the legacy of which remains in Germany in far-right support concentrated in the eastern Länder – the vision would match that of Delors: an evolutionary process, driven by reconciliation rather than nationalism, characterised by dialogue and mutuality throughout.

It would be experienced, over time, simply as the organic fading of the British link as north-south integration proceeded in the European frame. And it would be associated with a tapering over decades of the Westminster subvention to Northern Ireland, currently running at some £5,000, or more than €5,700, per person per year, as hitherto UK public programmes became transposed into an Irish context, rather than the shock to the Irish fiscal system a sudden reunification would pose.

This process would go with the grain of the now extensive economic and civil-society co-operation across the island. And it would reflect a growing appreciation within the North that the region will indefinitely stagnate, or worse, unless it remains open to the wider Europe, in a way that only an Irish corridor may now provide.

• Robin Wilson is author of The Northern Ireland Experience of Conflict and Agreement: A Model for Export? (Manchester University Press, 2010) and the forthcoming Meeting the Challenge of Cultural Diversity in Europe: Moving Beyond the Crisis (Edward Elgar)